It's pretty important not to take too seriously reviews of your work - some are good, some are bad, some are pertinent, some have nothing to do with your work at all. Anyway, H. F. Gibbert - whoever that is - seems to be doing a bunch of reviews on Amazon, and he or she said this about Dreaming Again: 'Several stories were almost breathtakingly well-written. These included Rjurik Davidson's "Twilight in Caeli-Amur" and the last story in the book, "Perchance to Dream" by Isobelle Carmody.'
One of Overland's semi-regular correspondents (we discovered her/she discovered us in our search for a regular music reviewer) Anwyn Crawford, has written a piece on Nick Cave for the latest issue. It's been causing quite a stir around the traps on the internet. Anwyn - who is a brilliant writer - pulls no punches. I don't agree with everything she says - I'm a Nick Cave fan, really - but her article was long overdue, and I felt, when it came in to be edited, that finally I could breathe a sigh of relief. She says so many things that should be said. There are many great paragraphs in the piece. But here's one which discusses his new novel. (I have tried to read his first novel And the Ass Saw the Angel a number of times and found it turgid, and almost unreadable.) Anyway, over to Anwyn:
One might then turn to Cave’s new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, on which much of his ascendant reputation as Australia’s Renaissance man has been staked. It is, in a word, putrid (though Cave himself would doubtless prefer ‘graveolent’). The word ‘vagina’ makes its first appearance three sentences in and continues to reappear, with wearying regularity, for the duration of the book. I’m no prude – it’s not the word that offends me, but rather Cave’s joyless genital fixation: the same bored, reductive, anatomical attitude towards sex that distinguishes hardcore pornography. Here, women really are nothing more than a series of interchangeable holes and sex like a trip to the ATM: stick your card in the slit, then take it out and walk away. To the sleazy salesman Bunny Munro, the novel’s title character whose wife commits suicide early in the book due to his philandering (but then again, we are reminded many times over, she was crazy), women are either begging for it with their legs apart or, if not, they are bitches and possibly dykes. Cave has nothing remotely interesting to tell us about the complex pleasures of sex or desire: such insight is beyond him as a writer, both on a technical and – if this is not too strange a word – spiritual level. Any reader who thinks that the novel’s obsession with women’s vaginas is a reflection of the main character, rather than of the writer himself, need only look to Cave’s execrably pretentious first novel And The Ass Saw the Angel.
Nick G emailed me today asking if I had any ideas for the cover art for The Library of Forgotten Books. I thought some mediterranean images or perhaps some from antiquity: Roman or Greek-style buildings, theatres, aquaducts and so on. Anyway, I did a bit of a search, and found this really cool Picasso (the bottom image), which suits 'The Passing of the Minotaurs' beautifully. Don't suppose Pablo would be that keen to lend it to me though...
And then I found this other cool minotaur picture of a sculpture, with a minotaur prostrate.
And yet a third, which I like because the minotaur looks so thoughtful and a bit kind.
Readers of Overland may have noticed in the last couple of years that we've endeavoured to publish and review the best writers from the Speculative Fiction scene here in Australia. We've had stories by such luminaries as Margo Lanagan, Jack Dann, Lucy Sussex, Ben Peek. We've also interviewed international figures China Mieville and Kim Stanley Robinson. Recently I decided that over the summer one of my projects will be to catch up on the work of some of the other fine writers of Australian SF who are less recognised than they should be, including: Trent Jamieson, Deb Biancotti, Ben Peek, Paul Haines, Kim Westwood. Some of their work will be reviewed in Overland - one more reason to subscribe! - some I may blog about. It's going to be a fun project, I think, partly because when I say these writers are fine, I really mean it. I've admired their work in the past, but I've never had a chance to systematically take a look at their careers. If anyone can think of Australian SF writers I reallyshould add to the list, let me know.
A few Friends of the Earth activists are currently in the middle of walking from Sorrento to Port Melbourne, as part of an awareness campaign about climate change and rising sea levels. You can read about their trek here.
Here's a video from their third day, introduced by my friend Damien:
1. The year slips by, doesn't it? Not too long ago winter was just starting.
2. The piece I wrote on the film Balibo is now out in Metro magazine. I think it makes the right points but it's not particularly well written. It seems a casualty of "being too close to the issue." I felt pretty disappointed by the film's lack of critique of the Australian government's role in the whole affair, and bang on substantially about that, probably to the detriment of the piece as a whole. I think I was so concerned about documenting how one couldn't understand the journalist's deaths without this critique that I didn't take the time to make sure the piece worked as a whole.
3. I'm currently working on a story for a themed anthology, and writing to a theme presents obvious challenges. For starters - and obviously - there's a theme you have to stick to (in this case it's Fermi's Paradox). This limitation sculpts the story in a particular way - you can't just write and see what happens, you need to think it through a lot more, and in my case, stick more to the theme. The second thing is that there's the deadline, which encourages discipline ("Gotta have this finished by Monday so I have the rest of the week to review it") but there's also the attendant pressure. More on this later.
4. One of the best things to do as a writer is to find someone to read your work who is not themselves a writer, someone who will respond in a non-technical way, whose response will be simple and gut-level: "I like this" or "I was bored by this." They aren't necessarily going to be able to tell you exactly why something in the piece doesn't work. But they will give you a really good indication of where things are working or not working. Anyway, O has been reading my novel and she says: "I need more of your book. Not sated by first 9 chapters. You've combined some of the best themes. Like, you know the time when Trosky as Young Einstein was put in James Cameron's The Abyss to play chess with the dragon from the Neverending Story. You know that one?" I think that's a good sign?
5. I saw the Strange Fruit show, Ringing the Changes, at the Melbourne Festival last weekend. That's K at the front, and A, who I went to school with, is one of the musicians. Looks like fun doesn't it?
Recently there's been a bit of a discussion about why no SF writer has won the Booker prize. As far as I know, it was begun by Kim Stanley Robinson in a piece for New Scientist. After quoting Virginia Woolf's complimentary letter to SF great Olaf Stapleton, he wrote:
Oh, I know there is a Booker prize, I've heard of it even in California - supposedly given to the best fiction published in the Commonwealth every year - but there are no Woolves on those juries, and so they judge in ignorance and give their awards to what usually turn out to be historical novels.
Sometimes these are fine historical novels, written by tremendous writers; I particularly like Roddy Doyle, John Banville, Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh, and my favorite was Penelope Fitzgerald. But working, like all of us, in the rain shadow of the great modernists, they tend to do the same things the modernists did in smaller ways. A good new novel about the first world war, for instance, is still not going to tell us more than Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford. More importantly, these novels are not about now in the way science fiction is. Thus it seems to me that three or four of the last 10 Booker prizes should have gone to science fiction novels the juries hadn't read. Should I name names? Why not: Air by Geoff Ryman should have won in 2005, Life by Gwyneth Jones in 2004, and Signs of Life by M. John Harrison in 1997. Indeed this year the prize should probably go to a science fiction comedy called Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts.
This is not going to happen. But it is a minor injustice, which can be ameliorated by the readers of New Scientist: simply buy the book and read it. Be the jury yourself. Read like Woolf, widely and without preconceptions. Read science fiction, read historical fiction, make your own judgement, and then talk about it. Try this as a kind of experiment: read 30 writers new to you. It's a big project, but what a lot of good reading would come of it. And New Scientist readers will be quickest of all to see that the literature that best expresses our time, that speaks to our time, is science fiction. How could it be otherwise? Our world is a science fiction.
I found myself noticing how much of this year's shortlist is built around essentially science fiction conceits, although mostly in slightly stifled ways: Coetzee's Summertime is, among other things, about uncertainty in the face of versions of reality - the topic that Philip K Dick made so brilliantly his own. Byatt's absorbing The Children's Book, though rooted in a detailed Edwardianism, is in part about fantasy, and is structured around entry into and expulsion from Narnia-like paradises, or anti-Narnia hells. Adam Foulds's The Quickening Maze, set in the 1840s, is about transcending reality and distils moments of intensity that gesture towards SF's sense of wonder. They're all good novels. But how much better they could have been if their authors had allowed themselves to play with the complete paint-box of SF and fantasy.
